


Wishes are for Suckers

by Severina



Series: The Condemnedverse [1]
Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Community: tamingthemuse, Post Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-08
Updated: 2012-04-08
Packaged: 2017-11-03 06:10:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Severina/pseuds/Severina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ain't no point in wishing for what you can't have.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wishes are for Suckers

**Author's Note:**

> Written for LJ's tamingthemuse community, for the prompt "covet". Post Season Two.
> 
> * * *

The motel is set back from the interstate, down a cracked asphalt road that degenerates into crushed gravel before ending in a chain link fence, the red letters on the _Condemned_ sign faded and peeling in the sunlight. It takes about ten seconds for the bolt cutters to make short work of the lock.

The places stinks of stale urine and beer, old sweat and dried spunk. The musty blankets left behind from when kids actually used this place to drink or fuck or stick needles in their veins and slowly kill themselves have been home to at least three different kinds of woodland mammals, and are now crawling with ticks and fleas. But the building's got a roof with only a few holes and four reasonably sturdy walls, and though the glass has long been broken from most of the windows they'll still be a shitload warmer inside now that the nights are getting so damned cold.

And there's no Walkers. Place is so far off the beaten track the geeks haven't found it. Yet.

Daryl nods at Rick when they meet up again outside the crummy little office, relaxes and lets his crossbow dangle from loose fingers. It'll do.

For the first time since the debacle at the farm, since they lost Andrea, everyone takes a collective breath. There are even a few ragged smiles, a little frayed at the edges but still there.

The women clean a couple of the rooms – Daryl wouldn't give a shit if he had to sleep in a pile of dirt on the bare floor, as long as there was a wall to break the frigid gusts of wind and someone on watch to cover his ass – and then decide that the rooms need to air out before they can be used. So they end up setting up a campfire at the edge of the lot, ranging loosely around it on the grass to eat their dinner. 

And that's when it starts.

"Ice cream," Beth says.

"Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches," Carl adds.

Not again.

"A nice, thick porterhouse steak," Rick says.

Daryl leans against the rough stump at his back, looks up to catch Rick's eye. He expects this shit of the kids, but Rick should know fucking better. Ain't no point in wishing for what you can't have. 

But Rick's eyes have turned inward, his lips upturning in a small smile. "There was this place out on 140 West, out near Armuchee. Looked like a real dive from the outside, but inside? Cook made the best damn steaks on the planet."

Daryl shakes his head, looks away when Rick's eyes steal to Lori's so he doesn't have to see hers cut away, see that hesitant smile on Rick's face crumble. Everyone's quiet then, thank Christ, the tension in the air like a living breathing thing, and they turn their attention to their food and nobody else starts in on bullshit useless whining over lost dreams of cheese or pickled fucking herring or—

"Big Macs," Glenn says.

Daryl snorts. While the women fussed over clean bedding and the men set the perimeter, Daryl spent his afternoon clomping through the goddamn woods, searching out ever thinning game. He came back with three scrawny squirrels to supplement their dwindling supply of canned goods, gutted and skinned them all, set them to roasting on the spits. He's singlehandedly keeping these numb-nuts in actual protein and they're fucking wishing for Big Macs?

Glenn glances nervously his way, misinterpreting him as usual. "Okay, fine, so it wasn't really 'meat' in the traditional sense, and after you ate it you felt disgusting and like you might vomit, but… yeah, Big Macs." 

He can feel Glenn's eyes on him, but he only shakes his head and scowls, tosses a string of fat on the fire to see it sizzle. He watches the spark flame for only a second before pulling his eyes away, doesn't want to be fire-blind even though it's barely dusk. He's tried to teach them this shit, but most of them stare blankly at the flames anyway, only Rick and Glenn – and Andrea, and shit if that little blonde bitch wasn't starting to grow on him once she grew some balls, even if she did shoot him in the head – really taking the lessons to heart. Bunch of them would have been Walker chow five times over if it wasn't for—

"Not that we don’t appreciate everything you do," Glenn is spluttering, hands gesturing wildly, fanning the flames in the shifting light, "the… squirrels and everything. The rabbits, and… all that."

The others take up the chorus, and all it does is make Daryl want to slope further against the stump, scowl heavier at the ground. Except that he knows that they actually do mean it. So he forces himself to lift his head, to shrug his shoulders and nod before plucking another piece of squirrel meat from his plate with the tip of his knife and going to work gnawing at it. The others relax, too, and he thinks that's going to be the end of it, that maybe now they can finally get around to discussing what's important, like who's sleeping where and what the watch schedule is going to—

"Still," Lori muses. "Chocolate."

She purrs the word like it's a lover's name, like she's going to come right there just thinking of it, and the rest of the women take it up like a siren call, faces going soft, eyes all fucking dreamy. Daryl sticks his knife in the scrub grass at his feet, resolves to just ignore the rest of the goddamn conversation until they start talking sense. But then the kid speaks up again and he just can't.

"I could… try for some," Glenn says hesitantly.

There's a litany of No's, an "are you fucking crazy, dude?" from T-Dog, but Glenn keeps protesting, insisting that the little strip mall they barely glimpsed a few miles back is far enough from the interstate to have warranted being skipped when the first round of survivors went scavenging for something to eat, before most of them got eaten themselves. Daryl feels his shoulders tense up as the discussion rages.

He wishes he could relax when Rick pronounces, "No way, Glenn. We need you here."

But even though Glenn's shoulders slump and he nods his head in acquiescence, he knows that look in the kid's eye. This ain't over, not by a long shot. And that just means he's gotta be extra vigilant now, as if he didn't have enough to do. Fucking kid.

By the time the sun finishes setting they've cleaned up the remains of the meal, actually set a watch schedule that makes sense. Daryl loiters a few minutes by the dying fire, watching as the members of the group slowly make their way to their assigned rooms. Sees the way Rick stops to let Lori enter their room first, the stiff line of her spine telling him that she's not done being pissed about the Shane thing. Doesn't matter to her that Shane killed that bastard Randall – fucking rapist, no matter that he said he only watched, Daryl saw his eyes, he knows what Randall was – and then set her own husband up to be killed. He doesn't know what stops Rick from just shoving the dumb bitch in front of the nearest Walker and wiping his hands of the whole thing.

Except then his gaze flicks to Glenn, and he does.

Glenn's bunking with the old man, concentrating now on shoving one of their warmest blankets back into Carol's protesting hands, all his body language insisting that he's taking one of the threadbare ones for himself. He sees Herschel's nod of approval before the old man goes into the room. Sees Glenn follow Carol's progress back to Maggie and Beth, the way his eyes meet Maggie's before she shuts the door to the women's room.

Daryl shakes his head, turns away from the sputtering embers and slings his crossbow over his back. He's got first watch, and then he's gotta get at least a few hours shut-eye before he heads back out in the morning to search for their next meal. He's gotta concentrate on what's important, what's vital for their survival. Nothing else.

Ain't no point in wishing for what you can't have.


End file.
